A Thematic Analysis of Honey and Clover

Ayumi Yamada
Ayumi’s arc slaps the viewer in the face early on, and it doesn’t stop until nearly half way through the second season. The problem is, it’s a story that deals with something uncommonly seen in fiction, anime or otherwise, and so it can be hit-or-miss depending on your tolerance and personal experience.

Taken from the fifth episode, under a ceiling of rain, as she sees Mayama running toward Rika to offer his umbrella…

Why…? All I want is for the person I like the most to like me the most. Why? It feels like it’ll never happen. Forever…like this, forever…

Ayumi has her fair share of melancholic gazes out the window as well, and for good reason. And let’s not forget the ultra-quotable scene from episode twenty…

I wonder why, on TV or in magazines, love seems fun. So why is my love so sad and despicable?

Simple, and painfully true. Ayu’s arc tells the story of unrequited love right up to the end, complete with all of the self-reflections and angsty monologues and tears that come bundled with the package. She cries, a lot, and it’s perfectly fitting because that’s the only thing she can do. In a sense, she has an advantage over Mayama – as he said, girls become more beautiful when they’re in love, but what can a guy do it that situation? However, her tears earn her sympathy, not affection, and despite all of her efforts to look good for him during the summer festival, nothing could avert his faraway gaze. It’s like watching the second part of 5 Centimeters Per Second all over again: an utterly hopeless, yet completely unavoidable one-sided love.

Ayumi appeals directly to the viewer’s emotions, which is perhaps the exact opposite of what Mayama does, but her arc really hits home when it differentiates itself from other stories of unrequited love and deals with the aftereffects. We know that she loves him; we know that he doesn’t love her; we know that she can’t do much about that. So now what? Aside from using several practical examples to illustrate her pain – the summer festival being among the most effective – she also begins to question, and despise, her own situation.

The broken stem metaphor in episode thirteen marks the beginning of the questions that romance anime never ask the viewer.

I planted basil and beefsteak plants on my balcony in the beginning of summer. They grew quickly under the summer sun, but during one of the July typhoons, one of the beefsteak plants snapped in two. My mother looked at the plant and said, “that won’t return to normal, so tear it off where it broke. If you do that, a new stem will grow from there and new leaves will grow from it.” But I couldn’t help but hesitate, because the small leaves on the end of the stem were still healthy. They didn’t change at all after the stem snapped.

She still had hope at that point, but her hesitation became something far more painful by the end of the series. She couldn’t bring herself to break the stem, which was perfectly natural when you think about it: she really did love him. Destroying her own feelings like that would be a betrayal to herself, and there’s no guarantee that another stem would even grow in its place. And so she suffered, receiving the support of her friends – most notably Morita – until another person came along.

Very little needs to be explained about Nomiya; his actions are painfully obvious to everyone except Ayumi herself. Put simply, he was interested in her, and so he did what he could to work his way into her heart, attempting to heal her wounds. Much to his dismay, he realized how deep her scars ran, but being possibly even more mature – and certainly more smooth – than his coworker Mayama, he worked his way in without her even realizing it. But the most important part, and arguably the most interesting, occurred at their story’s conclusion in the second season.

I ran out because it felt like he saw right through me. I honestly wanted to call him. I wanted him to listen to a lot of things. And I wanted to ask him so many things…but I hated myself for thinking that. I mean, if I thought that, all of my feelings for Mayama would turn into lies. I don’t care how pathetic or embarrassing I look in front of everyone. My feelings for him…only that…was my bittersweet treasure…

And so we are introduced to another aspect of love: an unrequited love that is somehow self-sustaining. It causes its victim no end of pain, and yet, it came to feel natural to her, as if that was the way things should have been. Ayumi was not meant to be happy; she was meant to be lifted up and torn apart by Mayama’s most minute actions, she was meant to cry her eyes out while he was working into the morning with Rika. It wasn’t happy, but it was natural, something that had come to be a part of her life. Her “bittersweet treasure”, as she called it. However, Nomiya’s appearance was something incalculable, and with more than a hint of reluctance – fear that her years of bittersweet longing would evaporate into nothing if she abandoned them and broke the stem – she gave in to her true feelings and acknowledged the person that was standing beside her all that time.

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Tagged as: Chica Umino, Honey and Clover, J.C. Staff, Kasai